Woodturning - Burl Firewood Log to Live Edge Vase

Let's turn this piece of firewood into a live edge vase. Welcome back to the channel for another epic woodturning video and yes it will be pure woodturning, no resin involved. And just to give you a little bit of a history about this wood and why this is a salvaged firewood. So a couple of months ago someone reached out to me on Instagram and this guy was fairly local to me. He's also doing some wood carving in his yard and he's got a local contact who's a tree surgeon so has plenty of nice logs and woods available in his yard. So I went there have a look at it and yeah plenty of nice boughs I was able to pick up including this piece. It is always a great feeling to pick up nice wood especially if the wood originally was destined to be firewood. So I'm glad that I was able to give a second life to this piece of wood. So after trimming the piece on my bandsaw now ready to glue and using my 5 minutes epoxy resin to glue my waste block before I can mount this on the lathe. And as you can see I fairly off-centered the piece and there is a purpose behind it. So my plan is to retain as much as live edge and burl on the side as possible and hopefully I will end up with a piece which is kind of half and half and with a bit of live edge at the top as well. So we'll see. To shape this log into a vase I will be using my half inch borgage. This is a super versatile tool and while it does say it's a borgage you can use it for many different applications. If I could only choose one traditional tool in my arsenal definitely would be a borgage. As I shared before many times I look at the top side of the turning and as you can see here gently carving away the wood which gives you a better insight how the shape is coming along rather than looking at the actual cutting edge. While the piece is so off balance I normally go around 300-400 rpm and as it gets into a more round shape as you can see now I bumped up to around 800-900 and I won't really go any faster than 800-900 as well. And I purposefully left this footage in this edit. I'm a left-handed turner and I switched hands this time and you can see how uneven and wobbly my cut is. So now I have to switch over to a pull cut instead of using my push cut and the reason I switched hands just because of the camera positioning and the the angle I needed to switch hands and I think it was just a very good eye-opener how important it is to have the right tool positioning and using your stronger hand because here I'm doing the same cut by using my left hand to maneuver the cutting edge and it cuts perfectly. Once we have the desired shape I just switched over to my skew chisel and this will remove some of the tool marks from the bogage and this is a super satisfying moment as you can see all the vertical lines slowly getting carved away and this only means less sanding to come. Then just a little cleanup with my Dremel tool. I didn't have the right attachments and this was just a soft fiber kind of attachment but it still did a really good job to get into the corners and doors and getting some of the dirt out. As most of the tool marks were removed with the skew chisel very little sand handing was needed and took this piece all the way to 240 grit. Here I will be using a set of different Forstner bits ranging from 30 mil all the way to 50 mil to help with coring the inside of this piece. Then switching over to a carbide chisel which works really well on end grain turnings and also works really well on tougher wood like those. However due to the size of the projects and the depth I need to go in I was getting a little vibration so it was time to switch over to my big boy hollowing chisel and look at the size that's enormous size on the right hand side and on the left hand side that's my giant deep hollower. And excuse the shaky footage but this is when the tripod touched the lathe stand it just transfers the vibration onto the colour. Again filming on the inside of hollowing a vase is rather difficult getting the light getting the right camera angle and and also for me to see the actual cutting edge and here trying to do everything in the same time and my lights just fell off so I couldn't really film the entire hollowing process but once the hollowing was done I just went in with the negative rate scraper and note this tool is not upside down I get a lot of comments about this tool what I'm using upside down but this actually how is intended to be used and it works really well again removing some of the leftover marks. So I repeated this process a few more times and then I was ready to go over and start doing some sanding and again just like the outside I was sanding the inside all the way till 240 grit and after some sanding this piece was ready to come off from the lathe and here I'm just creating a little round over with spindle gouge then just a touch of sanding and the piece is ready to come off. So hopefully you enjoyed this week's project video I have plenty of awesome projects lined up for the coming weeks and months but please if you have any good idea what would you like to see on this channel let me know and I certainly will add this on to my to-do list because I create content for your entertainment not really for mine so whatever pleases the audience that's what I would love to make. So let me know what would you like to see and I will try to incorporate into my future projects and here I will be using Rubio Monocoat a pure finish and this is a two-part finish and once you carefully measure part A and then the accelerator part B and you gently mix A and B together it will give you a super durable and food safe finish but the reason I love this so much because it smells so good rather difficult to describe the smell but compared to linseed oil or danish oil this one is a different league so thank you for watching and see you back next week